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FILM; A Talk With the Ghost Of Top-10 Lists Future

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 21, 2003

IT is traditional, in the waning weeks of the year, for movie critics to look backward, sorting out the accomplishments and disappointments of the previous 12 months and noting the results on awards ballots and 10-best lists. (The results of that fretful and mysterious process will be published in this section next Sunday.) At a time when the annual tally of theatrical movie releases hovers around 500, and when every town with a population over that number seems to have its own film festival, those lists and prizes can seem downright stingy. Worse, they usually fail to capture some of the keenest excitement of the critic's job, which is the discovery of promising work by actors and filmmakers, young and not so young, at early stages of their careers. Think of this column, a partial roster of such work, not only as yet another end-of-the-year movie retrospective, but as an exercise in divination, a hopeful prophecy of the 10-best lists and Oscar tip-sheets of the future, and of reasons to keep going to the movies in years to come.

I look forward, for example, to a half dozen or so sophomore efforts from directors who made their feature debuts this year. It is hard to count Fernando Meirelles among the first-timers, not only because his ''City of God'' (which was voted best foreign-language film by the New York Film Critics Circle last week) shows such brazen stylistic self-confidence, but also because it seems to roll an entire career -- the coming of age story, the action movie, the social melodrama, the musical, the revenge epic -- into a single film. Other budding urban realists, like Peter Sollett (''Raising Victor Vargas'') and Eric Eason (''Manito'') worked on a more modest and intimate scale, balancing their ambitions with a warm, precise sense of their characters' particularity. This quality was richly evident in Tom McCarthy's ''Station Agent'' and Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's ''American Splendor'' (named best first film by the New York critics). Those were two of the strongest films to come out of the Sundance Film Festival in quite some time. All of these movies dispense with the stylistic navel-gazing that characterizes so much recent indie filmmaking, and show directors interested in making movies about subjects other than themselves, their friends and their favorite movies.

There is a consensus in the entertainment press that 2003 has already produced at least three freshly minted movie stars under the age of 21: Scarlett Johansson (''Lost in Translation'' and ''Girl With a Pearl Earring''), Keira Knightley (''Bend It Like Beckham,'' ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' and ''Love Actually'') and Shia LaBeouf (''Holes'' and ''The Battle of Shaker Heights.'') The attention these three have received is well deserved -- and it points to a remarkable flowering, in Hollywood and beyond, of very young acting talent, a kind of children's crusade against the exploitation and sentimentalization of youth. There is certainly nothing sentimental about the grim, cautionary tales offered up by Lukas Moodysson's ''Lilya 4-Ever'' and Catherine Hardwicke's ''Thirteen'' (another strong debut feature), though both films are open to the charge that they exploit the vulnerability and sexuality of their wayward heroines. Their volatile subject matter places a special burden on the performers, and Oksana Akinshina, who plays the impoverished Russian girl lured into prostitution in ''Lilya,'' and Evan Rachel Wood, the middle-class American girl led astray by a reckless friend in ''Thirteen,'' give their characters an emotional credibility that makes their exploits all the more poignant and terrifying.

Of course, the realities of young, modern life are not necessarily grim. There has rarely been a teen romance as sweetly believable as ''Raising Victor Vargas,'' in which Victor Rasuk and Judy Marte, New York high school students acting in their first feature film, capture not only the longing and self-conscious role playing of adolescent courtship, but also the intelligence, both wary and wide-eyed, of urban kids on the brink of self-discovery. A similar blend of toughness and innocence animates the faces of Keisha Castle-Hughes, the 13-year-old star of Niki Caro's ''Whale Rider,'' and Sarah Bolger, the older sister in Jim Sheridan's ''In America.'' ''I've been carrying this family,'' her character exclaims in a burst of heartbreaking precocity; along with her real-life younger sister, Emma, Ms. Bolger carries the movie as well, lifting it from family melodrama into a kind of kitchen-sink magic realism.

If the Bolger sisters bring levity to ''In America,'' Shohreh Aghdashloo, an Iranian actress, registers the full gravity of Vadim Perelman's ''House of Sand and Fog'' (yet another directorial debut, and one in its way as polished and self-confident as ''City of God.'') Speaking mostly in Farsi, often without subtitles, Ms. Aghdashloo (who was named best supporting actress by the New York critics) emerges as the saddest and most complex character in a drama whose subject is sorrow and complication. Her face registers all the drama that the movie does not show: a family's flight from Iran, and a marriage marked by tyranny and tenderness, loyalty and harsh disappointment. In Stephen Frears's ''Dirty Pretty Things,'' the English stage actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (who also plays Ms. Knightley's husband in ''Love Actually'') conveys a similar depth and complexity, without raising his voice or resorting to broad, actorly gestures. Okwe, a Nigerian doctor living a sleepless, precarious exile's life in London, is a good man in harrowing circumstances, and his struggle not only to retain his decency but to act on it is the movie's dramatic core. It's also the basis for the kind of performance that makes American movie audiences wonder where this actor has been hiding, and what he will do next.